Shipbuilding is strategically important – but statistically invisible. Across major shipbuilding economies, governments are making decisions on industrial support, skills and the energy transition with partial, inconsistent or poorly aligned data on the sector. This limits the effectiveness of industrial policy, complicates international comparability, and constrains the ability to evaluate outcomes. Recent analysis across 11 countries and the European Union highlights four key consequences of these data limitations.

Improved definitions, labour intelligence and innovation indicators can support improved policy targeting, monitoring and cross-country benchmarking – enabling more effective and resilient shipbuilding industrial policy.

Key findings

• Shipbuilding underpins competitiveness, security and the energy transition, yet policy decisions are often taken with incomplete evidence.
• Insufficient evidence reduces the precision of productivity-related policy interventions. 
• Workforce pressures are harder to anticipate.
• Progress on innovation and decarbonisation is difficult to quantify.
• Improving shipbuilding data is a strategic enabler, not a technical exercise.

Key policy recommendations

• Ensure systematic data availability on shipbuilding.
• Advance shared definitions through international collaboration. 
• Strengthen structured data collection through systematic engagement with shipbuilding stakeholders.
• Strengthen data infrastructure, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises.